Thursday, 13 July 2017

All Parts of the Same War

A resource-rich, socialist-led, multi-ethnic secular state, with an
economic system characterized by a high level of public or social ownership and
generous provision of welfare, education and social services.

An independent foreign policy with friendship and good commercial ties
with Russia, support for Palestine and African and Arab unity, and historical
backing for anti-imperialist movements.

Social progress in a number of areas, including women’s emancipation.

The above accurately describes the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, the
Libyan Arab Jamahiriya and the Syrian Arab Republic.

Three countries on three
different continents, which had so much in common.All three had governments which described themselves as socialist.All
three pursued a foreign policy independent of Washington and NATO.And all
three were targeted for regime change and destruction by the US and its allies
using remarkably similar methods.The first step
of the imperial predators was the imposition of draconian economic
sanctions used to cripple their economies, weaken their governments (always
referred to as ‘a regime’ or ‘the regime’) and create political unrest.From 1992-95, and
again in 1998, Yugoslavia was hit by the harshest sanctions ever imposed on a
European state.The sanctions even involved an EU ban on the state-owned
passenger airliner JAT.

Libya was under US sanctions from the 1980s
until 2004, and then again in 2011, the year the country with the highest Human
Development Index in Africa was bombed back to the Stone Age.

Syria has been sanctioned by the US since 2004
with a significant increase in the severity of the measures in 2011 when the
regime change op moved into top gear.

The
second step was the backing of armed militias/terrorist proxies to destabilise
the countries and help overthrow these "regimes".

The
strategy was relatively simple.

Terrorist attacks and the killing of state
officials and soldiers would provoke a military response from ‘the regime,
whose leader would then be condemned for ‘killing his own people’ (or in the
case of Milosevic, other ethnic groups), and used to ramp up the case for
a ‘humanitarian intervention' by the US and its allies.In Yugoslavia, the US-proxy force was the
Kosovan Liberation Army, who were given training and logistical support by the
West.

In Libya, groups linked to al-Qaeda, like the
Libyan Islamic Fighting Group, were provided assistance, with NATO effectively
acting as al-Qaeda’s air force.

In
Syria, there was massive support for anti-government Islamist fighters,
euphemistically labelled ‘moderate rebels’.

It didn’t matter to the ‘regime
changers’ that weapons supplied to ‘moderate rebels’ ended up in the hands of
groups like ISIS.

On the contrary, a declassified secret US intelligence report from 2012
showed that the Western powers welcomed the possible establishment of a
Salafist principality in eastern Syria, seeing it as a means of isolating ‘the
Syrian regime’.

The third step carried out at the same time as
one and two involved the relentless demonisation of the leadership of the
target states.

This involved the leaders being regularly compared to Hitler,
and accused of carrying out or planning genocide and multiple war crimes.Milosevic, President of Yugoslavia, was
labelled a ‘dictator’ even though he was the democratically elected leader of a
country in which over 20 political parties freely operated.Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was portrayed as an
unstable, foaming at the mouth lunatic, about to launch a massacre in Benghazi,
even though he had governed his country since the end of the Swinging
Sixties.

Syria’s Assad
did take over in an authoritarian one-party system, but was given zero credit
for introducing a new constitution which ended the Ba’ath Party’s monopoly of
political power.

Instead, all the deaths in the Syrian conflict were blamed on
him, even those of the thousands of Syrian soldiers killed by Western and GCC-armed
and funded ‘rebels’.

The fourth step in the imperial strategy was the
deployment of gatekeepers, or ‘Imperial Truth Enforcers’, to smear or defame
anyone who dared to come to the defence of the target states, or who said
that they should be left alone.

The pro-war, finance-capital-friendly, faux-left
was at the forefront of the media campaigns against the countries concerned.

This was to give the regime change and destruction project a ‘progressive’ veneer,
and to persuade or intimidate genuine ‘old school’ leftists not to challenge
the dominant narrative.

To place them beyond the pale, Yugoslavia, Libya
and Syria were all labelled ‘fascist’, even though their leadership was
socialist and their economies were run on socialistic lines.

Meanwhile, genuine
fascists, like anti-government factions in Ukraine (2013-14), received
enthusiastic support from NATO.

The
fifth step was direct US and NATO-led military intervention against ‘the regime’ triggered by alleged atrocities or planned atrocities of the target state.

At this
stage, the US works particularly hard to sabotage any peaceful solution to the
conflicts they and their regional allies have ignited.

At the Rambouillet
conference in March 1999, for example, the Yugoslav authorities, who had agreed
to an international peace-keeping force in Kosovo, were presented with an
ultimatum that they could not possibly accept.

Lord Gilbert, a UK defence
minister at the time, later admitted "the terms put to Milosevic
(which included NATO forces having freedom of movement throughout his country)
were absolutely intolerable … it was quite deliberate."

In
2011, the casus belli was that ‘the mad dog’ Gaddafi was about to massacre
civilians in Benghazi. We needed a ‘humanitarian intervention’ to stop this, we
were repeatedly told.

Five years later, a House of Commons Foreign Affairs
Committee report held
that "the proposition that Muammar Gaddafi would have ordered the
massacre of civilians in Benghazi was not supported by the available
evidence."

In 2013, the reason given for direct military
intervention in Syria was an alleged chemical weapons attack by 'Assad's
forces' in Ghouta.

But this time, the UK Parliament voted against military
action and the planned ‘intervention’ was thwarted, much to the great
frustration of the war-hungry neocons.

They still keep trying though.The recent claims of the White House, that they
had evidence that the Syrian government was planning a chemical weapons attack,
and that if such an attack took place it would be blamed on Assad, shows that
the Empire hasn’t given up on Stage Five for Syria just yet.Stage Six of the project involves the US
continuing to sabotage moves towards a negotiated peace once the bombing
started.This happened during the bombing of Yugoslavia and the NATO
assault on Libya.A favoured tactic used to prevent a peaceful resolution
is to get the leader of the target state indicted for war crimes.Milosevic was indicted at the height of the bombing in 1999,
Gaddafi in 2011.Stage Seven is ‘Mission Accomplished’. It’s when the target
country has been ‘regime-changed’ and either broken up or transformed into a
failed state with strategically important areas and resources under US and Western
control. Yugoslavia was dismantled and its socially-owned economy privatised.
Montenegro, the great prize on the Adriatic, recently joined NATO.

Libya,
hailed in the Daily Telegraph as a top cruise ship
destination in 2010, is now a lawless playground for jihadists and a place
where cruise ships dare not dock.This country, which provided free education
and health care for all its citizens under Gaddafi, has recently seen the
return of slave markets.

Syria,
though thankfully not at Stage Seven, has still been knocked back almost
forty years. The UNDP reported:Despite having achieved or being
well under way to achieving major Millennium Development Goals targets (poverty
reduction, primary education, and gender parity in secondary education,
decrease in infant mortality rates and increasing access to improved
sanitation) as of 2011, it is estimated that after the first four years of
crisis Syria has dropped from 113th
to 174th out of 187 countries ranked in the Human Development Index.Of course, it’s
not just three countries which have been wrecked by the Empire of Chaos. There
are similarities too with what’s happened to Afghanistan and Iraq.In the late
1970s, the US started to back Islamist rebels to destabilise and topple the
left-wing, pro-Moscow government in Kabul.

Afghanistan has been in turmoil ever since, with
the US and its allies launching an invasion of the country in 2001 to topple a
Taliban ‘regime’ which grew out of the ’rebel’ movement which the US had
backed.Iraq was hit
with devastating, genocidal sanctions, which were maintained under US and UK
pressure even after it had disarmed.Then it was invaded on the deceitful
pretext that its leader, Saddam Hussein, still possessed WMDs.

The truth of what has been happening is too
shocking and too terrible ever to be admitted in the Western mainstream media.

Namely, that since the demise of the Soviet Union, the US and its allies have
been picking off independent, resource-rich, strategically important countries
one by one.The point is not that these countries were
perfect and that there wasn’t political repression taking place in some of them
at various times, but that they were earmarked for destruction solely for
standing in the way of the imperialists.The propagandists for the US-led wars
of recent years want us to regard the conflicts as ‘stand alones’ and to regard
the ‘problem' as being the ‘mad dog’ leadership of the countries which were
attacked.But in fact, the aggressions against Yugoslavia,
Libya, Syria, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the threatening of Iran, North Korea,
Russia and Venezuela are all parts of the same war.Anyone who hasn’t been
locked in a wardrobe these past twenty years, or whose salary is not paid
directly, or indirectly, by the Empire of Chaos, can surely see now where the
‘problem’ really lies.The ‘New Hitlers’ - Milosevic, Hussein and
Gaddafi - who we were told were the ‘biggest threats’ to world peace, are dead
and buried.But guess what? The killing goes on.